Gun Work

Through the dust and smoke as Barney ducked out of aimed sight, he glimpsed a naked man inside the room, emptying a big revolver at the intruders.

It was Zefir, the fat tormentor upon whom Barney had once puked, in another life. He had been interrupted in mid-rape by the invasion of the Palacio, but determined to achieve his wretched little squirt before his own special love-nest door wrenched apart into fiery splinters. Now he stood firing wild into the clouded green hallway, his pathetic erection barely visible in the shadow of his substantial belly. His victim was tied to a four-poster bed by athletic bandages and there was a game show blurring across the TV screen.

Barney fired with the shotgun from a distance of eight feet and the flechette round tore Zefir to ragged single-serve pieces. He actually glimpsed parts of his own body raining down around him before he dropped.

Karlov was attempting to sit up.

Barney saw this and watched long enough to see his comrade give a thumbs-up. I’m okay, don’t worry, move it!

What was left of Zefir lay in a widening scarlet puddle on the wooden floor, his cognizance purely reptilian. Barney slapped him to a semblance of awareness, then hissed, “Sucio. ¿Donde está Sucio?”

“Gahhh,” said Zefir. He died.

Karlov limped into the breached room, favoring his left leg. The woman on the bed had gone tharn while being rompered by Zefir, and naturally reacted to his intrusion as a preamble to further abuse. He had to calm her down but could not muster much Spanish.

More gunfire, from the hallway. Mostly Armand and Sirius, sweeping and clearing.

Barney handed the shotgun across, the message in his eyes clear. I’m going to follow them and open the remaining rooms. Karlov nodded just as the woman, arms freed, grabbed him like a lost daughter and started sobbing.

Other hostages were probably most secure in their locked rooms until the floors could be flushed of gunners. Armand and Sirius knew they had to find the room with the computers, the office of El Chingon. They had zipped open enough rooms to verify they were in the right place, doing the right thing.

Opposition began to wane noticeably. Gunners were either dead or hightailing it.

Barney stepped out into the hallway to reload, and that’s when the enormous Sucio smashed into him like a runaway bulldozer, grabbed him by the throat and hefted him clear of the ground.

Thirty or more big-ticket hostages at $500 U.S. per day was a rake of $15,000 every twenty-four hours — not bad when you considered it was above and beyond the ransom demands, which corkscrewed up into the millions more often than you would assume possible, given Mexico’s reputation as one of the world’s great sinkholes of poverty. Tannenhauser had a wonderful little slot machine going at the Palacio; it nearly always paid off. Tannenhauser was the man Barney wanted. Sucio was the man he got.

Sucio, the stone-idol sonofabitch who had snipped off Barney’s fingers, then forced them down Barney’s throat. Sucio, who had the blood-rage for the death of his brother Jesús at the hands of a pair of pinche gringos. Sucio, of the daily beatings and humiliation, head pervert of the guard branch of this madhouse. The man who had shot Barney four times and dumped his carcass into the sewer, albeit not in that order.

He was a year older, a year more aromatic, and his gouged eye had healed into a droop that mocked Tannenhauser’s lazy left orb. He emerged from the green fog like the legendary chupacabra, neckless, fulminating with anger, the size of a small bear. That make-believe bloodsucking cryptid, brother to Sasquatch and the Abominable Snowman, was said to possess the power to give mortals nausea with its glowing red eyes. Sucio pretty much fit the profile.

Barney had rehearsed this moment a half-million times in his mind. He would track Sucio down, cripple him, make sure he knew who was killing him, and then finish him off, maybe after making him eat all of his own fingers. Or Barney would shoot him in the legs with his .22 until Sucio would gladly chop off his own penis to escape the pain. Something that was the ultimate in degradation. Barney would taunt the bigger man, spitting his venom back at him, trying for some humiliation that could compensate for what Barney had lost. But no matter what he did to Sucio, the only thing it would change was whether or not Sucio still occupied the world of the living. Payback ran deeper than that.

It was all an indulgent joke, anyway, with Barney as the butt. Because Sucio had appeared out of nowhere instead of being tracked and run to ground. He now had Barney’s neck in a vise-grip and was crushing his larynx. And in the big man’s face was no sign of recognition at all. None.

And now Barney was going to die by Sucio’s hand not far from the first Bleeding Room; joke squared.